Data transportation across a communication network is critical to network performance. The advent of fiber optics as a means of information transmission has enabled increasingly greater speed and volume of data transportation, and fiber optic data transport systems have evolved to form the backbone of most communications and telecommunications networks. Optical transport networks began as systems designed for optical interfaces that used a single wavelength per fiber. As optical component technology advanced, systems permitting the transmission of multiple optical signals over the same fiber using wavelength division multiplexing enabled an increase in data carriage capacity without increasing the signal rate per se.